VDURA offers to undercut all-flash rivals amid SSD price surge

VDURA is offering a Flash Relief Program whereby it will match or beat VAST Data and WEKA all-flash array quotes on performance and capacity measures, and at half the total cost.

It says that SSD prices are now 16 times higher than disk drive prices and its Hydra mixed flash/disk media architecture with its parallel file system software, erasure coding protection, data reduction, and global namespace can deliver data at rates to keep GPUs occupied. Its announcement singles out VAST Data and WEKA but applies to any other all-flash high performance file systems alternative, which we understand includes DDN and others. VDURA claims its HYDRA is a SW-defined, high-performance, parallel file system with true linear scaling, native mixed-fleet SSD/HDD support, end to end performance and intelligent tiering, engineered for sustained flash-velocity reads/writes, maximum GPU saturation, operational reliability for strict SLAs, and superior economics for providers in today’s AI infrastructure race. Additionally, the ratio of flash to HDD can also seamlessly change over time with online dynamic cluster expansion, delivering both immediate cost savings and the flexibility to adapt as workloads or the underlying device commodities economics change over time.

VDURA CEO Ken Claffey said: “This flash crisis is exactly what ‘flash-only’ vendors have already acknowledged as a severe rut where they are forcing hard decisions on customers.”

For context, VDURA says “the flash supply crisis has reached a breaking point. Between Q2 2025 and Q1 2026, 30 TB SSD pricing surged 257 percent – from $3,062 to $10,950 – while HDD pricing rose just 35 percent. At CES 2026, VAST Data called this the ‘worst storage rut in 40-plus years’ with a 200 exabyte deficit, 52-week lead times, and price increases exceeding 50 percent.”

It says customers and resellers report stalled deals and requotes 2-3x above original pricing. All-flash vendors with single-commodity architectures face severe allocation constraints with no relief in sight.

Claffey said: “Several years ago, we had the foresight to pioneer the only modern high performance data storage infrastructure that isn’t chained to a single storage commodity. By intelligently utilizing all types of storage media in a true mixed-fleet architecture, we overcame the end-to-end performance bottlenecks and operational complexity that plague legacy tiered systems.”

“Today’s market volatility is now proving us right: our customers and partners are uniquely positioned to achieve high-performance, GPU-saturating infrastructure at dramatically lower cost and with far greater supply chain resiliency than rigid all-flash alternatives can deliver. That’s why our new Flash Relief Program challenges any all-flash config: submit yours, and we’ll beat the price by 50 percent while matching or exceeding your specs – proving mixed-fleet isn’t just smarter, it’s immediately accessible relief.”

VDURA cites this example of current SSD system price rises showing the divergence from hybrid flash/disk configs – a 25 PB deployment delivering 1,000 GB/s performance:

• All-flash architecture: $8.50M (Q2 2025) → $24.54M (Q1 2026)
• VDURA mixed fleet (20% SSD/80% HDD): $6.56M (Q1 2026)

VDURA is basing its program on its product’s features:

• Exceeds Nvidia and AMD GPU guidelines for storage performance
• Up to 60 GB/s reads, 40 GB/s writes throughput per flash node
• Software-defined storage (SDS): Not tied to proprietary hardware like legacy hybrid architectures, our software runs on a multi-vendor ecosystem for adaptability, hardware availability and no vendor lock-in
• Resilient and efficient file level network erasure coding with inline data reduction for even greater mixed fleet effective capacity
• Unified namespace with single data and control plane for management simplicity
• Online software upgrades
• Linear scalability without performance degradation

Potential customers should submit a valid AFA configuration, including performance requirements (throughput, IOPS, latency), capacity requirements (raw, usable, effective), and configuration details here – or by email to [email protected].

VDURA will then provide a competing proposal within 24 hours that:

• Undercuts total cost by 50 percent.
• Matches or exceeds performance specifications
• Matches or exceeds capacity requirements (usable and effective)

Comment

This is the latest shot in a marketing battle between all-flash array and hybrid flash/disk array and data management vendors. They are arguing about the best way to respond to raging flash/SSD price rises and a summary of their discussion points can be found here. VDURA’s message is that its hybrid SSD/HDD parallel file system design can offset SSD price rises better than anything all-flash tray vendors can do.

If SSD prices continue to rise and there is no relief for shortages, such messages could cause potential all-flash array buyers to shift gears and look more closely at hybrid SSD/HDD systems with automated tiering.

Bootnote

VDURA tells us HYDRA stands for its High-Performance, Yield-Optimized, Distributed, Resilient Architecture, and is the core technology behind it’s mixed-fleet tiering architecture. “It is engineered from the ground up to sustain flash-velocity throughput and maximize GPU and accelerator utilization while efficiently leveraging mixed SSD and HDD fleets for cost-effective scale. HYDRA’s distributed, shared-nothing design with elastic metadata enables linear performance and capacity growth without centralized bottlenecks, while built-in network and multi-level erasure coding provide hyperscale durability and automatic self-healing to maintain strict SLAs during device or node failures. By combining high sustained performance, intelligent native mixed-fleet tiering, and policy-driven optimization, HYDRA delivers superior real-world price-performance versus flash-only architectures and serves as the architectural foundation of VDURA’s data storage infrastructure software, with additional capabilities to be introduced as part of our GTC announcement.”